Adaptive block matching motion estimation algorithm using bit-plane matching

Motion estimation/compensation techniques are extensively used in video compression because of their abilities to exploit the high temporal correlation between successive frames of an image sequence. We first propose a new matching criterion called bit-plane matching (BPM) for distance measurement in the block matching algorithm. This criterion not only considers the magnitude but also the directive information of the pixel elements in the block. A simple adaptive block matching algorithm is also developed to adjust the search origin and search range at a block-by-block basis. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves similar MSE performance for motion-predicted images but requires about 8 times less the number of computations than the full-search method